Home › The World's Kitchen › Rechauffe of Mutton with Rice
Rechauffe of Mutton with Rice
Cut in half-inch-square pieces all meat from leg of mutton left over from yesterday. Heat in a small saucepan an ounce butter, add one finely chopped white onion and cook for five minutes, stirring well once in a while. Dredge in one ounce flour, stir well, then pour in a pint broth, mix well and let boil for ten minutes. Add mutton, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well, then slowly cook on range for thirty minutes, occasionally mixing. Dilute an egg yolk in two tablespoons cream, add to mutton, then mix while heating for two minutes. Dress a boiled rice on a hot dish crown-like, pour mutton in centre and serve.
A leftovers dish built on a plain onion velouté, finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Nothing here is difficult, but the last step decides whether the sauce is silky or scrambled.
- The liaison must not boilOnce the yolk and cream go in, keep the pan below a simmer and stir for the two minutes given. A boil curdles the yolk and leaves grainy threads through the sauce. Off the heat entirely is safer than on it; the residual warmth is enough to thicken.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of cayenne is a half teaspoon, which is aggressively hot by current taste — start with a quarter and adjust at the end.
- Ounces are weightAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; an ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup. Together they make a roux for a pint (2 cups) of broth, giving a sauce that coats but still pours.
- "Slowly cook on range"This means the lowest steady heat on the stovetop, barely bubbling, for the full thirty minutes. Cubed cooked mutton dries out at a hard simmer; the point of the long slow period is to let it take up the sauce.
- BrothLamb or mutton stock if you have it, otherwise beef; chicken stock leaves the sauce tasting thin against the strong meat. Unsalted, since a full teaspoon of salt is added later.
- Mutton and lambMutton is sheep over about two years old, still sold by some halal and specialty butchers but uncommon otherwise. Leftover roast leg of lamb behaves the same way, though it is milder and needs the nutmeg and cayenne no less.
- The rice crownBoiled long-grain rice pressed into a ring mould and turned out on a hot platter, or simply banked round the edge with a spoon. It wants to be dry and separate, not sticky, or it will slump into the sauce.
- YieldA pint of sauce and the meat off a leg-end will serve four generously with the rice.
Réchauffé is simply French for "reheated," and nineteenth-century cookery books commonly grouped such dishes under the word. Roasting a whole leg of mutton left a large amount of cooked meat, and a common treatment was to dice it, bind it in a made sauce, and give it a French name. The technique here follows a familiar pattern: a blond roux with onion, stock, a long gentle heating, and a yolk-and-cream liaison to enrich the sauce at the last moment. Cayenne and nutmeg are frequently met with mutton in recipes of the period. Serving the meat inside a ring, or bordure, of rice was a familiar dressing.